The Huffington Post Wins Its First Pulitzer Prize

Jeff Bercovici
,
Forbes Staff
I cover technology with an emphasis on social and digital media.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When AOL CEO Tim Armstrong made a deal to buy the Huffington Post for $315 million, he knew he was getting a big infusion of web traffic and social media savvy. What no one could have foreseen is that he was also buying a big chunk of prestige: The site just won a Pulitzer Prize, journalism's highest prize.

The Pulitzer Committee awarded the prize in the category of national reporting to David Wood for "Beyond the Battlefield," a 10-part series about the struggles severely wounded veterans face upon returning home. A longtime military correspondent for Time, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun and other news organizations, Wood has been a Pulitzer finalist before but has never won. He's one of the relatively small number of journalists who worked at AOL before the merger, at Politics Daily, and was retained afterward.

It's also the Huffington Post's first Pulitzer. Online news organizations have only been eligible for the prizes since 2009.

In other Pulitzer news, The New York Times won two prizes, the same number it won last year. No other news organization claimed more than one. No prizes were awarded this year in the areas of fiction or editorial writing.

Here's the full list of winners, finalists and citations.

PRIZES IN JOURNALISM

1. PUBLIC SERVICE

For a distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper or news site through the use of its journalistic resources, including the use of stories, editorials, cartoons, photographs, graphics, videos, databases, multimedia or interactive presentations or other visual material, a gold medal.

Awarded to The Philadelphia Inquirer for its exploration of pervasive violence in the city’s schools, using powerful print narratives and videos to illuminate crimes committed by children against children and to stir reforms to improve safety for teachers and students.

Also nominated as finalists in this category were: The Miami Herald for its exposure of deadly abuses and lax state oversight in Florida’s assisted-living facilities for the elderly and mentally ill that resulted in the closure of dangerous homes, punishment of violators and creation of tougher laws and regulations, and The New York Times for the work of Danny Hakim and Russ Buettner that revealed rapes, beatings and more than 1,200 unexplained deaths over the past decade of developmentally disabled people in New York State group homes, leading to removal of two top officials, movement to fire 130 employees and passage of remedial laws.